Wednesday, 28 October 2015

How to install Exchange 2016

In this article, we will walk through how to install Exchange 2016.Introduction

Exchange 2016 is very similar to Exchange 2013 and is often labelled as Exchange 2013 SP2. As a result, the install is almost identical and the prerequisites are the same.

PreparationBefore we go ahead and install Exchange, we need to go through a few tasks.1) Sizing. To ensure that we size up Exchange correctly, we should analyse our current infrastructure and use the Exchange sizing guidance to work out how much RAM/CPU each Exchange server requires. If you're virtualizing your Exchange servers, you can always add RAM, vCPU and disks to your VMs after you first install them.2) System Requirements. Check that the system you are going to be installing on meets the System Requirements.3) Release Notes. Often this is missed out but is usually quite useful. Always ensure that you read the Release Notes as there is useful information which can prevent problems down the line. 4) Windows UpdatesEnsure that the server you will be installing Exchange on has the latest Windows Updates.5) Join to domainJoin the server to the domain in which you will be installing Exchange.6) Add storageAdd additional disks for storage as required.

InstallationOnce you've gone through the preparation steps above, it's now time to install Exchange. The recommendation from Microsoft for Exchange 2013 was to install multi-role servers but with Exchange 2016, the CAS and MBX roles have been merged so installing multi-role servers is no longer possible.

1) Assign correct permissionsFor the first Exchange server in the organization, the user that performing the install must be a member of the Enterprise Admins and Schema Admins group in AD and a member of the local admins group on the server you are installing Exchange on. If you're not installing the first Exchange 2016 server in the organization and are installing the same version as existing Exchange 2016 servers then you don't need to be an Enterprise Admin or Schema Admin but you do need to be a member of Organization Management role group.We'll now go on to install the pre-requisites for Exchange in step 2. 2) Install .Net 4.5.2 from here. Accept the license terms and click install:

5) Install the required Windows featuresUse the below command to install the required Windows features. This command needs to be run on a single line and run from a PowerShell window with elevated privileges. Those who can remember extremely long PowerShell strings will note that this is the same list of features required for Exchange 2013.

The AD tools are included in the above command - this prevents issues with AD operations and the EXSetup program.

6) Download Exchange 2016 from here or the latest Exchange CU. The Cumulative Update includes the entire Exchange package. There is no need to install Exchange then install the CU.

7) Once downloaded, double click to extract Exchange.

Select a location to extract the files to. In this demo, we're extracting to C:\temp\Exchange2013-x64-cu10.

8) Run Setup Once extracted, open up the location you have extracted to and double click on Setup.exe:

You should then be presented with a window to report a successful installation.9) Confirm the installation was successfulTo do this, run the command below. This will list all the Exchange servers, their roles and version. Check that your new Exchange server is listed with all the required roles.Get-ExchangeServer

Also, review the setup log for any issues. This log file is C:\ExchangeSetupLogs\ExchangeSetup.log.

ConclusionIn this post we went through the steps required to install Exchange 2016. In upcoming posts, we’ll look at what needs to be done to migrate from Exchange 2013 to 2016 and other Exchange 2016 configuration steps.